“Are you okay, Perry?”
Perry nodded. Again, he had his hands against the fan, blowing its feeble attempt at heat on the dashboard of Jeff’s car. They should stop and buy him gloves, Mira thought, before leaving Bad Axe. There was a stillness to the air that made the snow seem even colder and more enveloping than it ordinarily would—and of course there was so little heat coming out of the vents that it seemed pointless to be idling in the funeral home parking lot, letting the car “warm up.” The car seemed only to grow colder as they sat in it, engine rumbling around them, interior lit up by the white electric Dientz Funeral Parlor sign, as if that pale light were lowering the temperature of everything it touched.
Still, Mira wasn’t ready to drive, and Perry had yet to speak since he’d said good-bye to Mr. Dientz.
When he’d first come back from the Werners’, he’d spoken so quickly, been so flushed and breathless, that he reminded Mira of the ranting “preacher” who sometimes stood on a bench on campus and shouted at the students as they passed. On every campus she’d ever studied or visited, there had been such a preacher. Always a cheap-looking suit, a good haircut, eyes so pale they seemed to be lacking irises. What this particular ranting man said usually made sense, sentence to sentence, but no sense at all when put together: Lightning was striking cell phone towers. The producers of television shows were trying to read our minds. People in gray coats were hard to see, and could sneak up on you.
Perry had seemed to be trying to hold back that same ranting passion, bordering on mania, insanity, when he came back saying he’d seen Nicole.
He’d seen Nicole, he said.
He’d seen her teeth.
But there was also something about a cat, and Mrs. Werner’s hair—how it was more beautiful than it used to be—and a Hammond organ and a game of Hide and Seek, and then he just quit talking altogether, and Mira knew she had to get him out of there. She’d said to Mr. Dientz, “It’s time for us to leave.”
It had been a day full of shock and awe, and Mira regretted the toll it had obviously taken on Perry—beginning with the horror of Lucas at the morgue, and then the discussion with the woman from the Chamber Music Society, and then the photographs on Mr. Dientz’s computer.
It was no wonder it had ended with Perry seeing a dead girl in her parents’ house.
Mira looked over at him and thought of the cliché “you look like you’ve seen a ghost”—but didn’t say it. She reached over and took one of the hands that was pressed to the heater and brought it to her cheek.
Poor dear, she was thinking, surprised by how cold the hand was to her touch.